1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a parking control system and a control method thereof and, more specifically, to a parking control system and a control method thereof that can decrease the number of times that a driver presses a button in order to select a desired parking mode and can prevent an excessive increase in the number of button presses even when the driver misses the desired parking mode by mistake.
2. Description of the Prior Art
As vehicles are used as necessities for people these days, the number of vehicles significantly increases, which results in serious problems with parking. Parking spaces may be reduced with the increase of vehicles in limited areas, cities, and countries, and in order to solve the deficiency in the parking spaces, the parking section for a single vehicle becomes narrower. Further, in cases where many vehicles are parked together in a parking space that does not contain any markings for parking sections, space between vehicles may be narrow. In this case, it is difficult for a driver to park his/her vehicle in the narrow parking space or to take the vehicle out of the narrow parking space by driving the vehicle himself/herself while identifying obstacles around the vehicle with his/her naked eyes. Accordingly, parking control systems have been recently developed and embedded in vehicles to assist with parking by automatically steering the vehicles while the vehicles are parked in parking spaces.
Parking control systems provide various parking modes according to the arrangement and position of a parking space, a parking direction, and the like. The parking control systems basically provide a perpendicular parking mode or a parallel parking mode according to whether a vehicle is to be parked in a perpendicular or parallel parking space. In addition, the parking control systems provide a right parking mode or a left parking mode according to whether the parking space is on the right or left side of the vehicle. Further, in the perpendicular parking mode, the parking control systems provide a reverse parking mode or a head-in parking mode according to whether the vehicle is to be parked in a reverse parking space or a head-in parking space.
The plurality of parking modes may be sequentially selected by a driver's manipulation of a button for selecting the parking mode. However, in the parking mode selection process, the driver may miss a desired parking mode if the driver makes a mistake when pressing the button for selecting the parking mode. In this case, the driver has to press the button for selecting the parking mode all over again in sequence in order to select the desired parking mode. Further, the button for selecting the parking mode is likely to break down due to the excessive use thereof.